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Partly to mostly cloudy. Low around 45F. Winds light and variable..
Partly to mostly cloudy. Low around 45F. Winds light and variable.
Columbia Gas has reintroduced a proposal to build a replacement point-of-delivery facility northeast of Warrenton. Neighbors to the project have united against it, as they did in 2019, when Columbia originally proposed the new facility. The county’s planning commission and board of supervisors must now sort out the situation.
Columbia currently operates a point of delivery facility — the natural gas equivalent of an electrical substation — at the corner of Dumfries Road and Riley Road. It’s one of three Columbia PODs in Fauquier County and 130 in Virginia. The Rock Springs POD, as the existing facility is called, routes gas from the TransCanada Pipeline to 1,639 homes and to 15 commercial customers, including two public schools. Columbia wants to replace the 52-year-old POD with a new one, moving to a new site 950 feet away.
The plan requires a special exception permit from the county. Citing widespread opposition to the plan expressed at a public hearing, members of the planning commission decided to delay voting until their next meeting, on Oct. 20. Then, after another public hearing, county supervisors could vote on the permit as soon as Nov. 10.
“If Columbia is unable to build the new POD site, it may be necessary for Columbia to restrict usage of the current POD, limiting the ability to provide reliable natural gas to customers along the Rock Springs distribution system,” according to the company.
Columbia in April 2019 obtained an easement for a facility on the new property along the west side of Riley Road. The 10-acre parcel is also slated for a six-home residential development.
While there are no critical safety issues currently, the 50-year-old facility may have to be shuttered if its age presents safety concerns, Columbia representatives warn, noting that more than 1,600 customers would be left in the lurch if the POD was shut down.
In 2019, like now, residents of the Marstella Estates and Rock Springs subdivisions objected, even though some of them are themselves Columbia customers. They have said that even though the new facility would be fewer than 1,000 feet from the old one, building the facility would reduce their home values and put them at risk from an explosion if the facility malfunctioned.
Even opponents concede that explosions related to natural gas distribution are extremely rare. But people living near the Riley Road site point to a 2018 explosion of a Columbia pipeline in Massachusetts that killed one person and injured 25 others. While that incident didn’t involve a POD facility, they argue that the incident proves that Columbia can’t be trusted to build a safe facility.
Opponents said in 2019, and again in their latest objections, that POD facilities should be built away from houses in an area zoned for industrial use.
Columbia indicates that any explosion would have a radius of no more than 90 feet — and therefore not risk damage to any existing or planned homes — but opponents claim that Columbia may be lying about this as well.
The dispute seemed to be resolved in spring of 2020, when Columbia announced it had identified a site “in a non-residential zoned area” for the new POD. But that fell through, and Columbia submitted a zoning application this summer to build a new POD at the original site it had proposed in 2019.
Nearby residents have the same objections as they did three years ago. A petition against the current proposal has gained 132 signatures. “Why are we here? I thought we already dealt with this a few years ago,” said one exasperated speaker, nearby resident Greg Corcoran, at a public hearing Sept. 15.
“The question for all my neighbors is, ‘Can Columbia Gas be trusted to live up to all these promises?’” added Peter LeCompte, who lives about 1,500 feet away from the proposed POD.
Kyle Brown, who lives about 700 feet from the proposed facility, said that Columbia should have upgraded its POD long ago. “To me, it speaks to the culture. They don’t plan. They don’t maintain,” he said of the company. “I think a vote for Columbia Gas is kind of a vote against the taxpaying citizens in that part of the county.”
Columbia representatives maintained that there are no other options. Other landowners declined to sell or lease land for the facility, they said. Since the possible sites for a POD are extremely limited — it must be within 100 feet of a “trunk line” that runs along Riley Road and Dumfries Road and near the main TransCanada pipeline — the original site is the only viable one left, they added.
Finding a new site is made even more difficult because engineering standards have become stricter in the past 50 years, said a Columbia engineer at the public hearing, meaning that the POD must be located on a larger site. “We cannot build today to the 1960s standards it was built on,” Columbia engineer Cody Merkes told planning commissioners. The new facility needs a 100-by-100-foot area, much of which would be taken up by landscape buffering.
“We’ve heard from so many people in the community, and it’s been really tough trying to figure out what the answer is to all of this,” said Planning Commissioner Adrienne Garreau (Scott District), whose district encompasses the area.
“Given we’ve had one in that area, 1,000 feet away, for 50 years, it would be difficult for me to say at this point that it’s not an appropriate area for a POD,” she said. But she emphasized to the dozen or so opponents gathered in the room that, “I hear all of you.”
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